Vehicles are equipped with various types of communication systems that provide or facilitate various types of functions. For instance, a vehicle may be equipped with a global positioning satellite (GPS) system that provides for locating the vehicle and providing information concerning the location of the vehicle to a user. Vehicle security systems are also employed in many vehicles to protect the vehicle and its contents from theft or other criminal activity. For example, a vehicular security system may be configured to communicate with some outside entity (e.g., a police or security center) and when an attempt is made to break into a vehicle, the vehicular security system may transmit messages to the outside entity where appropriate action may be taken to prevent or stop the break in. Some jurisdictions even require the use of security systems in vehicles because of the high number of vehicle break-ins or thefts in these areas.
If a vehicle is stolen, stolen vehicle tracking (SVT) applications attempt to track and sometimes recover the stolen vehicle. To give one example, some SVT applications rely upon a GPS system to pinpoint the location of the vehicle and a Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) cellular network to report the incident to a service provider via Short Message Service (SMS) or General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) data connections.
Potential thieves have sometimes attempted to jam the receiver hardware located at the vehicle by employing devices that create a strong wide-band signal in the receive band and thereby block the GPS satellite from being received at the vehicle and/or to block GSM network signals that are sent from the cellular base station to the vehicle. Previous attempts at detecting such jamming and/or attempted jamming and reporting these actions to a security center have generally been unsuccessful and/or expensive to accomplish.
As mentioned, various approaches have been used to determine that a vehicle is stolen. Unfortunately, these approaches sometime suffer from the problem of false reports of vehicles being stolen. That is, the approaches determine that the vehicle is stolen for a particular reason when, in fact, the vehicle has not been stolen. This results in wasted resources since the authorities may track and recover a vehicle believed to be stolen when in fact it is not stolen.